Design and Flight Test of an Adaptive Vehicle Management System on an AH-64 Helicopter Demonstrator

The three and a half year Adaptive Vehicle Management System (AVMS) Phase II program developed technologies in the areas of tactile-cueing based carefree maneuvering, maneuver aiding, and mission aiding. It also flight tested these technologies on three platforms, an H-6 Little Bird technology demonstrator, MH-47G Chinook, and AH-64 Apache. This paper focuses primarily on the results from testing the AVMS technologies on the AH-64 Apache helicopter. In summary, the results show a significant improvement in mission productivity, workload, performance, and handling qualities. These results substantiate the hypothesis that the AVMS technologies provide significant, positive impacts on attack helicopter platforms and it proves AVMS technologies can improve multiple metrics simultaneously without the expense of impacting the other metrics.